Businesses need to transform to keep pace with changing ecosystems, says Oracle's John Abel

The cloud is one of the world's most important business technologies today

The entire model of the cloud is changing. From its first enterprise implementation in the ‘90s, the platform has developed into a critical business tool for quickly accessing shared pools of resources; whether those are data, networks or applications. Users can also realise very significant cost savings by virtualising workflows.

Development of technology in the cloud space is fast-moving and many companies are capitalising on that, offering native apps; management; or cloud infrastructure itself. Perhaps one of the best-known of those firms is Oracle.

"Oracle offers a truly integrated cloud. We offer our customers best-in-class services across Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)," John Abel - head of technology and cloud for Oracle UK, Ireland and Israel - told us.

That wide service offering of infrastructure, data, platform and software in the cloud differentiates Oracle from major rivals like AWS, Google and Microsoft, which dominate the cloud space. The firm began as a database company and now has a diverse product offering; and the cloud solution reflects that.

Abel says that the cloud is one of the most important technologies to be involved with today. He feels that there are more costs associated with ignoring the cloud than migrating to it:

"Businesses are being disrupted at a rapid rate, and they need to transform to keep pace with their changing ecosystems. They need to quickly think about migrating off legacy systems that are hampering change or risk losing ground to competitors. The cost of not transforming is the cost that companies really need to be worried about."

Oracle's Cloud is the industry's broadest and most integrated cloud, with deployment options ranging from the public cloud right through to the data centre.

Flexibility is a major advantage of the cloud, which vendor lock-in is antithetical to. Abel tells us, "Oracle Cloud offers flexibility and choice, compatibility and interoperability with other technologies. We also offer portability across public cloud and on-premises to ensure that they build the best solution for their business."

Oracle has a simple goal in the face of the established market leaders: to help its customers - both new and existing - realise the benefits of cloud technologies; often as part of a digital transformation. One of those is AT&T, which Oracle is helping to migrate "thousands" of existing databases and application workloads to the Oracle Cloud

In terms of new customers, Oracle is heavily involved in the public sector; in the UK, for example, the Home Office is coming on board with the UK Government Cloud solution. Another new client is YellowDog, which has used the scalability of Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure Platform to build a service business leveraging high-performance computing. Neither of these have gone through what could be called a typical cloud implementation - as Abel notes, there is really no such thing!

"It's hard to identify a ‘typical implementation'. Most of our customers are on their own journey to the cloud, from those moving parts of their business to the cloud, through to those moving all of it to the cloud. No two journeys are the same, because they begin in very different places."

Oracle, and John, will be attending Computing's Cloud and Infrastructure Summit tomorrow.